>>519213460
>Exploration breeds innovation
What drove innovation during the cold war was the battle of economical attrition, fought by the US to slowly wear down the Soviet economy, and that worked. Once the Soviet Union vanished, there was no longer a need to really innovate in the West, that's why everything went slowly to shit after the 90s.
Space exploration is a giant meme, we will never leave this solar system. The nearest star system to ours is the triple star system of Alpha Centauri, it's about 4.2 light years away or 25 trillion miles. It has two confirmed planets: Proxima b, an Earth-sized planet in the habitable zone discovered in 2016, and Proxima d, a candidate sub-Earth which orbits very closely to the star. The main issue with traversing such unimaginable giant distances, is that nothing can travel faster than light, which is capped at around 300,000 kilometres per second (671 million mph). The closer you get to light speed, the more energy you require to increase your speed further, with the energy requirement trending toward infinity as you approach light speed. Thus, nothing with mass can even reach the speed of light. It would take light, the fastest thing in the universe, roughly 4.2 years to reach Proxima Centauri. In comparison, the fastest craft we've ever made, the Parker Solar Probe, is flying through space at around 192,227 m/s (429,999 mph), or less than 1% the speed of light. It would take the Parker Solar Probe more than 6,600 years to travel the same distance. At a maximum speed of about 17,600 mph it would have taken a Space Shuttle about 165,000 years to reach the same destination. Another discovered planet is Epsilon Eridani b, at a distance 10.4 light years away. If the Sun were about the size of a baseball, and was being kept in New York, then the star Epsilon Eridani would be about as far away as Paris, the orbit of the planet would be a ring about 30 meters across, and the planet itself would be about the size of a pea.